Environment/Wildlife

If you give a hoot about raptors, come visit the California Raptor Center’s (CRC) Open House on Saturday, Oct. 20th from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. We have two new owl residents for you to meet—a barred owl named Tadita, and Ember, our first barn owl education ambassador in six years!

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has opened an investigation into hundreds of seal deaths this summer. Nearly 600 harbor and gray seals stranded on beaches from Maine down to Massachusetts.

A black bear cub that was severely burned when a wildfire roared through her habitat in Northern California is receiving a fishy treatment that officials and veterinarians hope will heal her quickly so she can be released back into the wild.

A young black bear whose paws were burned raw in the Carr Fire is recuperating with special care from a wildlife veterinary team.
On Monday, an eight-member team including Dr. Deana Clifford and Dr. Jamie Peyton of the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital spent nearly six hours preparing for the operation and sewing tilapia skin onto the bear's four paws. One benefit of the fish skin — which doesn't smell fishy — is that it contains collagen that aids in healing.

To prevent the next pandemic, pinpoint it at the source. That’s the idea behind PREDICT, a global surveillance program that has spent almost 10 years hunting for new viruses that could spill over from vulnerable wildlife to humans.

In May, two critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals were found dead on a beach on Oahu. Both were female, and one was pregnant. After performing a necropsy, veterinarians determined that both animals died of toxoplasmosis, a potentially fatal disease that originates in domestic cats.

For the last three years, not one calf has been born to the dwindling pods of black-and-white killer whales spouting geysers of mist off the coast in the Pacific Northwest. Their population decline is alarming and may be due to several factors.